Whistler’s Mother is printed on stamps and treated as the visual definition of maternal devotion, yet James McNeill Whistler despised sentimentality and titled the work Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, insisting the sitter’s identity was irrelevant. This episode follows the combative American expatriate from a restless childhood in Russia, where his railroad-engineer father worked for the emperor, through his expulsion from West Point under Robert E. Lee after declaring silicon a gas, to a job at the U.S. Coast Survey where he doodled mermaids on official maps and learned etching.

We trace his reinvention in bohemian Paris, the lesson that black anchors a painting, the rejection of Symphony in White and its showing at the 1863 Salon des Refusés, and his decision to give paintings musical titles so viewers would stop hunting for a plot. Then come the accidental creation of the portrait of his mother, the Peacock Room fiasco in Frederick Leyland’s dining room, the libel trial against John Ruskin that won him one farthing and cost him everything, the Venice etchings that rebuilt his career, the feud with Oscar Wilde, and the butterfly signature to which he added a stinger.

• Why Whistler saw the portrait of his mother as a study in geometry and balance rather than a tribute
• How musical titles like nocturne and harmony were meant to re-educate the viewer
• The famous courtroom defense of a fee as payment for the knowledge of a lifetime
• How the Ruskin verdict bankrupted him and forced the sale of his house and collections
• His role in clearing the path for 20th-century abstract art